A budgetary sleight of hand threatens to undermine rationally designed repair fund.

A car drives past a water main break on the corner of Oasis Dr. and Stillbrooke Dr. Monday, Jan. 2, 2012, in Houston. ( Johnny Hanson / Houston Chronicle )

The ReBuild Houston plan was supposed to be a dry and logical prioritization of infrastructure projects that befitted our city engineers. Then City Council got control of the funds. Now that voter-established drainage fee, which is supposed to create a pay-as-you-go fund for street and drainage repairs and pay down previous infrastructure debt, is going to be diverted to pay for council members' pet projects.

This is all the result of a poorly conceived plan to allocate $1 million to each district council member to spend on his or her own agenda. However, council did not raise additional revenue to fill these slush funds and likely will have to siphon the dollars from ReBuild Houston. This move threatens to undermine a rational worst-first plan of street and drainage repairs that kept politics out of the question. Now City Hall is slipping back toward a system of loudest first, where council members can put political aims over good governance. It is the exact sort of short-term thinking that all too often seems to drive our municipal government.

There still isn't even a guarantee that this process will speed things up. These funds will have to go through the usual procurement process, and dollars diverted from ReBuild Houston will still come with charter-prescribed spending restrictions attached. With these rules in place, the funding change just seems to open the door to political influence, all while allowing council members to take credit for projects that would likely happen anyway.

There is also a sense that this fight over funds may be more about personality than policy. Tensions between City Council and the mayor feel like they've reached a fever pitch, especially after last month's fight over contracts for tax collection vendors that included a rare council override of a mayoral ruling. It can make folks wonder whether council has simply lost faith in City Hall's established practices - if they can't trust the Department of Public Works and Engineering to fix the city streets, then gosh darn it, they'll do it themselves.

But if there really is an issue with business as usual, then council should be tackling the big problem and try to make the system work better. Instead, they've created a workaround that threatens to drain the ReBuild Houston fund.

Texans have condemned these budgetary sleights of hand at the state level, and they're all too common in Washington D.C. No one should want to see these tricks down at City Hall, either.